Mike Z. Quote of the Day

I agree with you guys about the out-sourcing, and I am not blaming just one VP, i am just saying what i heard. I could really give an F what they do with their product and how they build it, but when i have to redo things because of the outsourcing incompetence, or their dates are pushed out and mine arent, it pisses me off.

THERE IS NO ACCOUNTABILITY AT NORTEL!

Do whatever you F'n please.

I have seen first hand how things get handed over. no transfer. send the difficult issues over. keep complaining and whining about how bad offshore teams do.

if it was really crappy in India, China etc. nobody would be doing business there. probably was crappy software to begin with. and yes i know many so called experienced engineers duplicating code. they would not survive for more than 2 months anywhere else. if they manage to get past an interview.

A recent skip level with a VP produced the verbal reference as to the cost savings of outsourcing saying it is now about equal. I take that the cost of outsourcing to a design team who cannot create software or fix it as a sign that the knowledgeable force inside the US/Canada may not have been so bad after all. The cost of redoing things is taking its toll. Software is crap and nobody in design is held accountable...hence one persons, uh...resignation..Director of Design level. Too bad it took this long to get her out, lets push dates out further....hope you don't mind paying customer.

Still a Nortel Slave, I don't know the circumstance you are referring to, but I have a hard time believing one director level person is responsible for outsourcing, is that what you are saying?

My recollection is, off shoring at nortel was really a couple of things;

1) Promises (false) of savings on loaded labor rate for development. This of course, was false because those brilliant MBAs could count the hourly loaded labor rate but not the added cost of customer dissatisfaction with quality, extra load on field support, and additional time in design and especially test. There was also this promise of "round the clock" development, handing it off every eight hours. I only know of three projects that ever achieved this feat of project management.

2) Inside quid-pro-quo between certain nortel execs and offshore development houses (yes, there were people arrested fired and prosecuted for this. No, I don't think they caught everyone involved especially at the higher levels).

3) Legitimate offshore business development that required jobs and investment to be considered for contracts and bids within the borders of that country. This should have been tempered to the relative size of the market potential, *and* these folks should be treated like *partners* rather than code dumpsters. Unfortunately, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

We knew early on that the shift of development off shore was problematic largely because the handoff was so poor. Many of those that got the software dumped on them were not adequately trained or had any idea what the software was supposed to do, let alone how it worked, but that was OK with the Sr. VP management. We also knew that although the people getting the software were (are) capable, they did not hang around long enough to get good at what they were doing.

We got away with bringing software to the states early on in the 1980s because that software was not nearly as dense. The proper technology transfer now is much more complex.

If you want to place blame there is a whole list of greedy, shortsighted, arrogant, know it alls at the level of Sr. VP and up that should hang their collective heads in shame.

Many et al - offshoring is a fact of life, so it's time to embrace it and figure out how to make it work, not resent it and try to swim upstream.

I've seen the whole gamut of offshore programs. Some have been extremely successful and some have been 100% waste of time and money for all involved. In EVERY case, the difference was in how it was run. The programs that viewed offshore resources as cheap labor and dumped the unpopular work there always failed. The programs that viewed the offshore resources as a valuable asset and decided to make it work almost always succeeded. The best programs figured out how to move 'ownership' of mature programs to offshore locations so that onshore resources could apply more horsepower to the innovative growth programs.

So in my mind, the bad taste associated with offshoring results from bad leadership from all levels of management and misguided resistance at the working level. Remember, for every bachelors degree developer here, India and China have 5 or 10 masters degree developers looking for work. And if you think the degrees here are a lot better, you're fooling yourself. So the next time you're thinking that the offshore team is a lot less efective, ask yourself how effective *you* are being at communicating with them and managing/working across locations. Chances are, the breakdown is as much or more at this end as at the other end.

The world we used to live in has left the building. Wishing it weren't so won't change a thing. The best path to prosperity is to find the new opportunities that are *always* created by change and are right in front of us if we open our eyes.

Many had it right when he referred to a culture of 'entitlement'. That's over. Adapt or perish.

organic growth again. good for all those folks who spent years developing failed roadkill products.

I have to take issue with Mike's comment because it tells you how out of touch he is with the troops on the ground. I spoke to friends in enteprise there today and things seem to be worse than ever from a planning and execution standpoint and no forthcoming resources in the way of headcount or dollars to deliver products in the plan of record. I don't see how they can rely on organic growth without much in the way of new products in the pipeline. From the looks of it, analysts on Bay and Wall Street don't agree with Mike's rosy view of organic growth. I'd love to hear folks from inside Nortel refute this view but they don't seem to exist.

When MZ joined Nortel, he said that R&D as a % of revenue was too high relative to the industry norm so he was going to fix that. Now he's saying that Nortel has doubled R&D investment? So was he wrong then or now? Is he referring to an absolute amount or R&D as a % of revenue?

I beive the doubling of R&D is in reference to 4G